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“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” – Steve Jobs

Mr. Bikky Khosla, C.E.O. TradeIndia.com, truly believed in this vision when he left his well-established business in the USA to lay the foundation of Infocom Network Ltd. in the year 1990. The story ahead will take you back in time and give you a glimpse of the foundation history of India’s largest B2B marketplace, TradeIndia.com.

In 1980s, right after college, Mr. Bikky Khosla ventured into a career in the International trade. He was running a successful import business in the United States of America but was having a tough time finding Indian manufacturers & exporters. Further, coordinating with them on a regular basis was a far cry from being hassle free. This is when he realized the need for a platform which can help the global export-import community and most importantly can provide Indian manufacturers & exporters an opportunity to present their products to global buyers.

In order to transform this vision into reality, he came back to India and with a handful of people in a very small room in the national capital of India, he started an organization, Infocom Network Limited which started publishing Exporters Yellow Pages. Back in those days when communication was a big challenge, the company faced a tough time in finding right data to compile a publication. But, as they say when you are determined, things are bound to fall at the right places. With Mr. Khosla’s focus and team’s hard work, all obstacles were conquered and 1st edition of the directory came out.

After quite a few successful editions of Exporters Yellow Pages, Mr. Khosla conceptualized a common and reliable platform that would assist manufacturers, suppliers, importers & exporters to trade with each other in a hassle-free way and thus, TradeIndia.com came into existence in the year 1996. India’s first B2B portal was established with a mission to make business easy for the Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The portal was started at the time when the people of the country were still coming to terms with computers, let alone internet. In such an era, selling an e-business concept to sellers who were not confident about how things are going to work was a gigantic task.

Year 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, companies based across the globe started speculating that internet is not for future, Mr Khosla started investing his resources and time to make the portal, TradeIndia.com more user friendly. He realised during that period that in future internet will change how businesses operate in India and globally. TradeIndia started offering various services which a B2B platform should offer such as “3 Page Website”, Trade Leads, Directory Listings etc. at pocket-friendly prices which were much less in comparison to their cost in the market at that time.

With the arrival of broadband connection in the country during 2007-2008, TradeIndia, which was growing at a moderate pace witnessed a tremendous surge in popularity and the number of registered users. That was the time when users with access to internet starting realising that TradeIndia is the way forward for them. With each passing day traffic to our platform started to grow. More and more users who used to think that internet is just a buzzword started realising that it is the game changer which will change how businesses operate.

However, the real journey of transformation started with the advent of smartphones around 2011. The rise of mobile devices combined with affordable internet access via broadband served as the key factor in propelling the tremendous growth of TradeIndia. Smartphones & lower data costs resulted in the higher participation of SMEs from both metro and non-metro cities. TradeIndia launched its mobile app in the year 2015 to stay abreast with the market developments. This app further helped the SMEs to spread their business on the move.

From a humble beginning to becoming India’s largest B2B marketplace, from a small office to branch offices in 43 cities across India with over 1800 dedicated professionals working in them, the cherished journey of 28 years was full of amazing rides and hard-hitting challenges. It is 28 years of existence for the company but it is still a start as the scale at which things are changing, in years to come, the organization along with its competent team is poised to grow by leaps and bounds & become a name to reckon with and this is and will only be possible with support of millions of our users. These users are the ones which fuel our growth, their visits propel us to make our platform better with each passing day and with this objective of ‘serving them the best’, we are tirelessly working to make TradeIndia.com the most trusted platform for all buy & sell needs of people based not only in India but across the globe.